Paperbacks: fiction and non-fiction

THE WAR MAGICIANThe Man Who Conjured Victory in the Desert by David Fisher

Fittingly for a book about a magician, this excellent and amusing biography starts with the sentence: “Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began.” Maskelyne, a successful conjuror, came from a long line of illusionists and was able to bring all his powers to bear in the Middle East during the second world war. After winning a conjuring duel with a Dervish imam to gain safe passage for British troops in Syria, Maskelyne was able to set up his own “magic gang”; their first job was to hide British tanks, a challenge that Maskelyne rose to by concocting camouflage paint from a mixture of rancid Worcester sauce and camel dung. He went on to turn tanks into trucks and to “hide” the strategic port of Alexandria from German bombers before concealing